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Comment by traspler | Hacker News Reader

It's commendable that the project states "anonymity is hard to get – solely using Tor doesn’t guarantee it" and "it is strongly advised not to use TorBox if your well-being depends on your anonymity". Other such solutions like to gloss over the fact that "using tor !== anonymity" and even the Tor Browser does a lot more to help with anonymity than just route your traffic through tor.

I'm still not sure where such a solution would be a good choice though. Getting access to the broader, uncensored internet is also not as easy as it seems in countries where this applies, e.g. China, as even getting an entry node that works is not easy so this is not a plug'n'play option anymore for that.

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> uncensored internet is also not as easy as it seems in countries where this applies, e.g. China

The Chinese mostly use shadowsocks. Tor usage from a mainland ip entry point is incredibly low.

> Shadowsocks is a free and open-source encryption protocol project, widely used in China to circumvent Internet censorship. It was created in 2012 by a Chinese programmer named "clowwindy", and multiple implementations of the protocol have been made available since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowsocks

Shadowsocks and similar tools are mainly about obfuscating your traffic flow so it‘s harder to classify and block by the GFW, right? The Tor Project has the „obfsproxy“ project for that I think, or is that aimed at something else? I always wondered why that did not overtake shadowsocks.

I use shadowsocks-libev for everything these days. It's UDP so unlike TCP it isn't quite as vulnerable to, say, central government or ISP mediated forged TCP reset packets. It's way faster than a ssh socks proxy too since it isn't limited to one connection. And it's tiny and requires very little CPU resources and only about 2 MB of ram.

It's getting less and less funny that I have to use the same methods as chinese citizens living under a dictator for life just to avoid my ISP attacking my HTTP connections.

From the first half of your comment, I assumed you were talking about connecting from China.

What would you say is a good place to find Shadowsocks? Looks like the main repo is empty: https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks with the readme stating "Removed according to regulations."

From right there looks ok. Just change the branch from rm to master. Not sure if there's a better place though

https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-libev

BTW, here is SSH proxy which uses pool of steady connections: https://github.com/Snawoot/rsp#performance

There are different kinds of anonymity. If you just want to hide you IP address from a specific website's operator, then you don't care much about being trackable or not. You just use Tor as a fancy IP spoofing technique. They know that you are you, but might find it harder to ban you or call the police on you. (Of course, they can just ban all of Tor. And of course this scenario is mostly useful for trolls... but I can imagine some cases where this you have a legitimate need to spoof you IP like this.)

But any of the VPN services out there do that for you without the incredible stigmata of having an IP of a Tor Exit Node and the reduced performance of the Tor Network.

On the other hand we definitely do want people to use tor for relatively innocuous reasons, so there's plausible deniability for all the people using it for legitimate reasons (eg. journalists, whistleblowers, etc.)

Most of the stigma just comes from people on HN. Start by fixing that.

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